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Introduction:
There is so much material being produced telling the CTO's, CIO's, CEO's,
Heads, Directors, Programme Managers, Project Managers, Managers,
Architects, Technicians, why they should move to the cloud.
The majority of these articles are written by the same group, Hardware Vendors /
System Integrators / Consulting Companies / Cloud Providers all telling why life
the universe and everything will be better when you are on the cloud.
The fact is, enterprises with mature SAP landscapes are simply not going to move
to the cloud overnight no matter how many times they are told it is the best thing
since sliced bread.
If the evangelists want to persuade the enterprises to move to the cloud then they
need to get into the enterprise's heads, see the world through their eyes, understand
their goals, motivations, worries and risks.
Then and only then will the evangelists be in a position to see a path to the cloud
which works for the enterprises with mature SAP landscapes.
The CIO is balancing technology, internal operations and increasing the company's
bottom line.
The CIO isn't looking at technology for the sake of technology, she/he is looking at
technology as a business man, for the sake of smooth operations and an optimal
bottom line, keeping the business running and trying new things in moderation and
without putting the business at risk.
When the CIO is owner in chief of a large mature SAP landscape, covering from
ECC-FI across SCM, CRM, SRM, HR, MDM, Portals, Mobile, etc, and having
overseen the journey towards the SAP landscape reaching maturity, stability,
good performance, an annual upgrade strategy, strong support organisation,
and probably paved that road with a lot of hard work from across the organisation,
is she/he really going to disrupt the apple cart and move all of that to the cloud in one
go ?
Having got her/his SAP landscape running like a swiss watch, she/he is going to lean
towards caution when making fundamental changes.
For sure, she/he knows about the cloud, she/he probably has cloud providers calling him
every week, and explaining how they can save this much money.
She/He probably has the CEO asking him why we're not looking at the cloud, because
the CEO's friends at the golf club are looking at the cloud.
What does she/he do, does he stick his head in the sand, or does she/he do something,
if she/he does something, what should she/he do ?
She/He needs a strategy.
This blog aims explore a strategy for the enterprises with mature SAP landscapes
to dip their toes into the cloud.
Scenario:
Large enterprise, stock exchange listed, leader in their field.
IT has been spun off to a separate daughter company, since several years ago
the large enterprise took the decision that IT is not the core business.
The daughter company has been sliced and diced, opportunities for outsourcing
have been followed the and daughter company IT Supplier is a lean organisation
providing IT Services to the core business.
SAP - mature comprehensive SAP landscape containing a good proportion of
the business suite product portfolio.
The SAP landscape is mature, stable, tuned and performing well, critical incidents
are low, there are yearly landscape upgrades.
Goals:
What are the goals, motivations, worries and risks for the CIO of an enterprise
with a mature SAP landscape ?
As Jason Hiner explains in this article, the roles and responsibilities of the CIO
are:
Chief Information Officer:
• Serves as the company's top technology infrastructure manager
• Runs the organization's internal IT operations
• Works to streamline business processes with technology
• Focuses on internal customers (users and business units)
• Collaborates and manages vendors that supply infrastructure solutions
• Aligns the company's IT infrastructure with business priorities
• Develop strategies to increase the company's bottom line (profitability)
• Has to be a skilled and organized manager to be successful
Considering the CIO's Roles and Responsibilities, the first question is....
Is there a (Business) Case for moving to the cloud ?
The first question on the subject of moving to the cloud has to be, why,
the reason for moving to the cloud:
. Is there a business case, or business demand for moving to the cloud
. Has the full roi analysis been made
. The case can also be in the area of moving to cloud to explore new IT strategies
. Having a cloud presence as a pilot and proof of concept
Assuming there is strong enough support for looking at the cloud, then, the next
question is....
Cloud Risks:
What are the risks and questions for moving something to the cloud ?
. Performance - how will the cloud solution perform on the global level
. Security - Vlunerability to Attacks - is the cloud solution regularly
penetration tested
. Support - - what is the experience of the cloud provider and incident
handling - how will ticketing/incident management be aligned between
the internal systems and the cloud provider, how reliable is the cloud
provider with incidents - will there be the situation where the cloud
provider is blaming internal IT and vice versa
. Application Lifecycle Management - how does it work in the cloud
. Business Continuity/Outages - What happens if the cloud provider goes
out of business
. Exit - What is the exit strategy from the cloud provider
. Governance & Compliance - for example, Pharma - Gxp, Sox,
Validated Systems ?
. Identity Federation
Assuming there will be mitigations for all of those risks the next question is...
For mature SAP landscapes what to move to the cloud first ?
Obviously the enterprise is not going to move everything in one hit.
The enterprise is going to move in a controlled manner with a clear back
out strategy if things don't work out.
And hence, the question for the mature, high performing, stable, SAP landscape,
what is moved to the cloud ?
What are the risks ?
. Move the most business critical SAP systems, ECC-FI, BI ?
. Move systems which are less business critical, CLM, Solution Manager ?
Obviously, there will be some arguments from system owners as to the
criticality of their systems, but most organisations have a high level risk
register for the SAP landscape classifying which systems are the most critical
. Move one system, eg, CLM to the cloud, what will be the performance between
the On-Premise SAP Portal, the Cloud based CLM, and the On-Premise SRM ?
. Even CLM, don't forget, CLM contains confidential contracts, is there really
a strong enough case for a SAP system containing confidential contracts to
be the first system to move to the cloud ?
This is not easy to answer, it is not easy simply to say, we're going to the cloud.
There needs to be a path to the cloud, a strategy for getting to the cloud...
A Path to the Cloud
There is an alternative path to the cloud, a lot more controlled and giving
the opportunity to dip the enterprise's feet into the cloud, while managing
risk and keeping options for the future open.
Hana Cloud Portal
Hana Cloud Portal is the opportunity for a conservative path to the cloud.
When an enterprise implements Hana Cloud Portal they will have the
opportunity to test all of the previously discussed risks.
The Hana Cloud Portal has a variety of uses which can be capitalised upon
immediately, Success Factors are now using Hana Cloud Portal as the
Customer Support Portal for their 4,500 Customers worldwide, other usage
types are explored here and here. Infact there is so much which the Hana
Cloud Portal can be used for it is the perfect stepping stone to the cloud.
On top of giving an opportunity to test all of the risks described earlier, the
Hana Cloud Portal gives the opportunity to explore amongst other things:
. User provisioning in the cloud
. SSO from the cloud to on-premise
. Integration between cloud and on-premise
. Performance of cloud hosted applications
. Performance between on-premise and cloud applications
Subsequently, depending upon the success of the Hana Cloud Portal pilot,
the enterprise could if they so wished and depending upon how comfortable
they felt, dip their feet further into the cloud by moving other SAP systems
to the cloud on a case by case basis where the case makes sense.
Hana Cloud Portal is, infact, the door to the cloud !
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